Dallas Woodhouse

Dallas Woodhouse, who ran Carolina Rising in 2014, could not be reached for comment Friday night. He is now the N.C. Republican Party’s executive director. Carolina Rising indicated on its 2014 tax form that its mission was to promote limited government, low taxation and a thriving economy.

After the 2014 election, the Center for Public Integrity found that Carolina Rising ran nearly 4,000 ads praising Republican Thom Tillis in the U.S. Senate race. Tillis defeated Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the Center for Responsive Politics published documents showing that Carolina Rising had used 97 percent of its revenue to pay for those ads, and that most of the money, $4.82 million, came from a single donor.

We might as well not even have a body like the FEC, if they can't (or won't) act on something so obviously unlawful. As far as reaching Woodhouse for a comment, he's probably passed out on a couch somewhere, sleeping off another celebratory drunk.

The last time the local board of elections met, Republican Kevin Hight proposed an early-voting plan that would eliminate the Smith Recreation Center as an early-voting site and end Sunday voting. I was surprised, because he certainly knows that the rec center is in the middle of a mostly African-American neighborhood near Fayetteville State University, and that it's well used by voters there. He also knows that Sunday voting - "souls to the polls" - is really popular in African-American church congregations. It was, in short, a pretty blatant move to cut into the black vote - which is also a predominantly Democratic vote.

Well, you have to give him this: Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, didn’t try to be clever or subtle when he sent an email to GOP members of county boards of elections and other party members last weekend. No, he basically instructed those board members to use their majorities to curb early voting, keep polling sites closed on Sundays, close college campus voting sites and in general, to, as he put it, “make party line changes to early voting.”

Woodhouse has inadvertently helped those fighting the voter ID law as discriminatory and partisan. And he has underlined the true motives in the voter suppression laws in North Carolina and elsewhere.

Dallas Woodhouse and his motley band of Twitter warriors screwed up in epic fashion last night. After rallying the crowds of Facebook to follow their Twitter War Room during the DNC last night, Woodhouse and his team failed to exercise basic common sense before attacking Tim Kaine during his speech.

NCGOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse said Tuesday Obama is not standing up for the constitutional rights of citizens. “Our question is if North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper will. Certainly there will be attorney generals across this country that will standup and fight these executive orders,” Woodhouse said.

“The president has done something here that he couldn’t get passed through the legislative process and that should concern all citizens,” Woodhouse said. “What the president has done here is assert authority we don’t think he has and what North Carolina citizens need is our state Attorney General Roy Cooper to do something about it.”

What the President has done is probably a far sight less than he should have, but you won't hear anything like that from the gun-nuts or GOP lawmakers and their political apparatchiks. Closing the gunshow loophole and cracking down on "private" sales is a critical step. Until that happens, it doesn't matter how accurate and up-to-date the federal database is, because somebody who would fail that test has a Plan B. And after all the harping about "mental illness" the gun lobby has used as a deflection, for them to condemn the very thing they've been promoting proves that was all just a sham. No logical ground to stand on.

If you or I give more than $50 to a candidate's campaign, our name, address and occupation must be reported and available for public scrutiny. The idea behind that level of accountability is that people should know who's trying to influence our government.

Yet it's no concern of anyone who gives $5 million — or $5 billion, for that matter — to one of these independent, nonpolitical organizations for exactly the same purpose of electing a candidate.

It's hard to believe people haven't taken to the streets to demand the identity of the wealthy ghost who wrote a check for almost $5 million to get Tillis elected, or that they aren't screaming at Tillis himself. People rant and rave about how politicians are bought and paid for, but they watch a television ad "paid for by Carolina Rising" and then go out and vote for the candidate this mystery group tells them to. Yes, our two-party system is partly to blame for that logical disconnect, but those voters should still be curious. And every time they see one of these ads, the curiosity should grow:

In all the excitement over the Republican victory wave Tuesday night, at least one GOP attack dog found himself on the wrong end of too many drinks. Not only that, he also found himself in front of the WNCN television cameras. I give you Dallas Woodhouse.

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